Succeed With Guitar Circuit Wire Better Than Anyone Else

Magnetic picks tend to use three types of magnets: Alnico II, Alnico V and the Ceramic. Each of these magnets can be generally associated with a type of sound. The Alnico II is known to give more of a bottom end sound; it's bassier and warmer. The Alnico V is a higher output pickup with more treble and more midrange. The Ceramic this has a very high output with a very high treble and midrange sound.

Guitarists have a lot of fun toys...stomp boxes, effects racks, the list is endless. However, your tone can suffer if your cables get out of control. This article will give you some quick tips to help you preserve your sound. Let's look at a somewhat elaborate setup, and let's pretend it's a live playing situation. It will help point out some strategies. Suppose your rig looks like this:

There are a number of pickups marketed as single coils that don't hum, including Fender's Vintage Noiseless pickups and Lace Sensor's "Holy Grail" pickups. For the most part, those types of pickups are actually tiny, bright sounding humbuckers. They are made to look like single coils by stacking the two coils on top of each other, instead of laying them side by side. No matter what anyone tells you the only thing that really sounds like a single coil pickup is a single coil pickup.

As for the copper wire, "overwound" pickups tend to sound louder and have more midrange and bass; pickups with less windings tend to sound softer and brighter. One of the reasons humbuckers sound the way they do is because it takes more wire to wrap the two coils. The thickness of the wiring and the type of insulation that is used are additional factors that affect the sound (e.g. Fender's early Strat pickups had Formvar insulation instead of enamel; insulating them that way gave them a clearer tone). Today most humbuckers are also wax potted so they won't squeal at high gain, but the wax potting hurts the clarity a little too (Gibson's modern Burstbucker pickups and Seymour Duncan's Seth Lovers attempt to reproduce the clearer tone of early humbuckers by eliminating the wax potting).